My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Son? Don’t you know me? Look me, my darling boy, in the eye!

  Though Schoenlicht and Kirk were seated not three feet apart, on either side of a narrow pinewood table, yet the younger man continued to avoid the elder’s gaze; sighing often, and passing a hand over his eyes, as if in a state of extreme agitation. This was apparently quite different from Schoenlicht’s normal behavior with others. Though indicted for the most serious offense, except for treason, that could befall him in the United States, the young man was in the habit of of staring stonily into space; not listening to his attorney’s words; showing indifference to his circumstances, and to his imminent fate. If required to answer a question (as, for instance, Bullock’s exasperated, “Son, do you want to live?”) he might shrug silently; then revert back into his stony trance. Abraham Licht had told Bullock that in his presence Christopher would “come alive—to a degree” but in fact this had not happened. Not to the degree that Abraham wished.

  At one of these meetings, “Mr. Kirk” whipped his white linen handkerchief out of his pocket, dabbed at his perspiring face, and said, in a voice edged with avuncular impatience, “Young man, I command you to sit still. I am your legal counsel’s assistant and you must answer my questions. Otherwise you will be lost.”

  At this, Christopher froze. In a most awkward position, one shoulder hunched forward and his head inclined to the right, as if gravity were dragging him down. Did he hear? Did he comprehend? Something glittered in a corner of his eye but did not spill over. Tight as a fist his face was clenched as if the spirit, the stubborn Licht spirit, had retreated far within.

  Abraham was reminded, with a shock of fierce tenderness, how, during his eldest son’s single year of college at Bowdoin, he’d had the opportunity to travel north to Maine, to visit the boy; discovering the lad in a tavern near campus, in the company of several friends. Abraham Licht had stood at a short distance listening to the boys’ artless speech, punctuated by laughter; he’d surprised himself with the thought How like the others my son is!—if I did not know he was mine, I would never identify him as a Licht. Later, father and son had quarreled over this issue, that Thurston should be on such easy, friendly terms with strangers; that he should be accepting invitations to visit their homes, which Abraham hadn’t known; that he should risk exposure, and at the very least a serious diminution of his powers. For how could Thurston perceive these individuals as enemies, if he allowed himself to befriend them in such a way? All men are our enemies, then and now was the ethic by which Abraham Licht lived, and the ethic in which he had trained his children, and how came Thurston, obedient Thurston, his Thurston, to contest it?

  The disagreement, like so many between Abraham Licht and his children, wasn’t so much resolved as simply dropped. For Abraham arranged for Thurston to be “expelled” from Bowdoin—a discreet bribe to a residence proctor, a discreet bribe to a dean, and the undergraduate was discovered “in a state of alcoholic inebriation” while returning to campus one night; the only young man of a dozen revelers to be so discovered, apprehended, and charged. It was a measure of Thurston’s extreme innocence, Abraham realized, that the boy had never guessed what, or who, lay behind his expulsion. He had simply accepted his fate—“My grades were not so very good, Father, in any case,” he’d said sheepishly. And how readily he’d pleased his father by agreeing that it was time to begin his professional career under Abraham’s tutelage, and break off his trifling friendships forever.

  “Do you hear me, Christopher?” Abraham Licht asked, in a wonderfully controlled voice. “Will you do me the honor of looking at me? I command you.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, shamefacedly, the young prisoner turned to his visitor. His lips trembled wetly. His gaze wavered. Yes I am your son. Yes I love you. But, Father—So strained was the atmosphere in the airless space, the uniformed guard dawdling in a corner took a sudden unwanted interest in them, and Abraham had to temper his speech and govern his manner carefully. For now that his unhappy son was facing him, and looking at him, tears gathering in his eyes, a slip of the tongue or a sudden inadvertent gesture might cause him to break into sobs and to throw himself, like a child, into Abraham’s arms.

  So Abraham spoke judiciously, and calmly. Asking why did “Christopher” refuse to cooperate with his counsel? Why did he show so little interest in his fate? And who was the true murderer of Eloise Peck?—“For if you know, son, you should tell. You should tell me.”

  For a long moment Thurston stared at him. His young face was drawn, and curiously lined, as if a mask of age had been fitted onto it. When he seemed about to speak, but did not, Abraham whispered, “I command you to speak. Otherwise you will be lost.”

  Was the guard listening? Could the guard, an ignorant, loutish man, have understood? Yet Thurston, being a Licht, could not trust him; and shaped with his lips the heartrending plea Father, I am lost in any case. Better die one than two. For it must be two if not one. Forgive me, Father! I am lost, Thurston is lost.

  The distinguished visitor from Manhattan pressed his pince-nez sharply against the bridge of his nose, and rose to his feet. With an abrupt farewell to the prisoner, he turned away; and asked the guard please to escort him out. He would visit him again, in the interest (or so it would appear to observers) of proffering moral support; but never again would the young prisoner so frankly face him, and never again would the air of the visiting room be so highly charged.

  3.

  For of course “Christopher Schoenlicht” was found guilty of murder in the first degree.

  And no recommendation was made by the jury for mercy.

  IT WAS ON a bitterly cold January morning, nearly six months to the day after the death of Eloise Peck, that the young murderer, manacled, hollow-cheeked, appeared before the judge who had presided over his trial, to be told the specific details of his fate.

  Had he anything to say to the court, the judge inquired, before sentence was passed?

  “Christopher Schoenlicht” stood hunched, between his attorney and a bailiff, hearing the judge’s words, yet not hearing them; his expression stony; his eyes resolutely downcast; his lower jaw slightly extended beyond the upper, and held rigid.

  He had nothing to say.

  So it was, nettled, the judge read off his prepared statement, slowly enough so that Schoenlicht might absorb every syllable of every word, to the effect that, his crime being one of inordinate savagery, and his state of mind since his arrest that of a thoroughly unrepentant man, he was thereby sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead, in accordance with the statute of the state of New Jersey, on a date to be determined by the public executioner, such sentence to be carried out on, or before, 1 June 1910.

  “LITTLE MOSES”

  1.

  Crime? whispers Father.

  Then complicity.

  Complicity?

  Then no crime.

  “LITTLE MOSES,” HUSKY for a child of ten, isn’t he, sweet-tempered and dim-witted, obedient, faithful, uncomplaining, yes, black as pitch, yes, able and willing to do the work of a near-grown man, and, yes, he will grow, and grow, and grow, and he will work, and work, and work, and being sweet of temper and dim of wit and black, black as pitch, he is faithful as a dog, he will be loyal for life, he has no thought of anything save work, he has no thoughts as you and I do, as white folks do, and, being of course the son, that is the grandson, of Alabama plantation slaves—will he not repay his cost numberless times over the next fifty years?

  And his cost, sir, is so reasonable, sir, I will whisper it in your ear so that he cannot hear: $600 cash.

  LEMUEL SHATTUCK, FARMER, of Black Eddy, Michigan; Alvah Gunness, farmer, of La Porte, Minnesota; Ole Budsberg, blacksmith, of Dryden, Minnesota; William Elias Schutt, candymaker, of Elbow Lake, Illinois; Jules Rulloff, farmer, of Horseheads, New York; the Abbotts, dairy farmers, of Lake Seneca, New York; the Wilmots, cotton manufacturers, of North Thetford, Pennsylvania . . . And his cost, sir, is so reasonable, sir, I will whisper it in your ea
r so that he cannot hear: $600 cash.

  Though the prosperous Uriah Skillings, stableowner of Glen Rapids, Ohio, paid $1,000. And Estes Morehouse, retired classicist, of Rocky Hill, New Jersey, paid $800.

  For these gentlemen, and for some others, “Little Moses” strutted, and cavorted, and grinned, and rolled his white, white eyeballs, and sang:

  “Come listen all you gals and boys

  I’m just from Tuck-y-hoe

  I’m goin’ to sing a lee-tle song

  My name’s Jim Crow!

  Weel about and turn about

  And do jis so

  Eb’ry time I weel about

  I jump Jim Crow!”

  In the autumn and winter of ’98, through the spring of ’99, they crisscrossed the countryside, frequently by night, frequently by back roads, Solon J. Berry and his obedient “Little Moses,” Mr. Berry possessed of a broad heavy melancholy face, close-trimmed salt-and-pepper whiskers, wire-rimmed glasses, a farmer who had lost his eighty-acre farm, a mill owner who had lost his mill, a former railroad agent for the Chesapeake & Ohio, a former druggist of Marion, Ohio, a casualty of the recession, once proud now humbled, once a man who owned property free and clear now a man hounded by creditors, ashen skin, pouched eyes, queer nicks and blemishes in his cheeks, forced to certain actions, compromises, pragmatic measures which, in his prime, he would never have considered—being a Christian, after all, of stolid Calvinist faith.

  Solon J. Berry, or Whittaker Hale, or Hambleton Fogg, but always “Little Moses,” for he was plucked from the bulrushes, yes, more or less, yes indeed, an Act of God, saved from certain drowning when the mighty Wabash River overflowed its banks in April ’89 in Lafayette, Indiana, a howling black baby discovered amid drowned dogs, drowned chickens, drowned rats, snagged by an iron hook and pulled to shore, lifted from a nest of matted grass and filth that teemed with spiders, a living infant!—a black infant!—abandoned by his mother yet living, still, thrashing with life, mouth opened wide to howl, to shriek, a vast O of a mouth, wailing, wailing!—why, the pitiful thing yet lives.

  And has grown husky, hasn’t he?

  And uncomplaining, and zealous, and patient, and doesn’t eat too much, and can work twelve hours a day, farmwork, lifting and carrying, scouring pans, digging ditches, did I say twelve hours?—fourteen; sixteen; as many as a task requires. And doesn’t need to sleep more than three, four hours, most nights, yes it is the black blood, yes his people were Alabama plantation slaves, the best West African stock, pitch-black, strong as horses, never sick a day until, at the age of ninety-nine, they drop over dead, why that won’t be till the year 2000, almost!—and here he is grinning, strutting, obedient as a puppy, clever as a little monkey, dull-witted as a sheep, reliable as an ox, and, when the mood is on him, a genuine entertainment right in the home, rolling his eyes, and snapping his fingers, and kicking up his heels, here is “Zip Coon,” here is “Poor Black Boy,” here is “’Possum Up a Gum-Tree,” but the pièce de résistance, the ne plus ultra, the flagrante delicto, stand back, give him room, it’s wild “Jim Crow” himself!

  AND ALL FOR $600. And no one ever to know, precisely, the terms of the orphan’s contract.

  SOMETIMES “LITTLE MOSES” slept for an hour or two in his new master’s house, in a corner of the woodshed where rags had been tossed, in the back room in Grandpa’s old urine-stained bed, once in a hayloft with mice and rats, once in a cardboard box beside a woodburning stove whose embers smoldered with a slow dull cozy heat, sometimes, more often, “Little Moses” didn’t risk sleep at all but lay awake, waiting, quietly waiting, for the white folks to settle down for the night.

  Then he would slip away, not a creaking floorboard to betray him, not a barking dog, “Little Moses” running hunched over, head down, crawling if need be, making his stealthy way from one shadowy area to the next, in case his new master was watching from a window (but how could he be watching, the fool was fast asleep with the rest), trotting out to the moonlit country road where, in the two-seater gig, “Solon J. Berry” waited, napping, as he liked to say, with one eye open.

  “IS IT TRUE, Father,” Elisha asked doubtfully, “—that you found me in the Wabash River?—in a flood?”

  Abraham Licht smiled, and lay a warm protective hand on the boy’s woolly hair, and said, after a pause of perhaps ten seconds, “No, ’Lisha. It was the Nautauga, back East, but folks hereabouts might not have heard of it; and I don’t want to arouse their suspicions.”

  “IS IT TRUE, Father,” Elisha asked, “that the white folks is devils, and all of them enemies? Or is some of them different, like you?”

  And Abraham Licht smiled, and sucked zestfully on his cigar, and said, “Now look here, ’Lisha—I’m not white. I may look white, and I may talk white, but I stand outside the white race, just like you, and all of my people stand outside the white race, because they are devils, and they are enemies, each and every one.”

  BUT NONE OF the enemies reports Mr. Berry, or Mr. Hale, or Mr. Fogg to the police.

  And none of the enemies reports “Little Moses” missing.

  “Nor will they ever, the wretches!” Abraham Licht says, baring his big white teeth around his Cuban cigar, counting his cash, “that, Baby Moses, we are assured of.”

  So they crisscross the countryside, keeping to the back roads, upon occasion traveling fast—very fast—along a main artery—no time to dally, no time to browse—but for the most part ambling along in no great hurry: for the land is beautiful, the North American continent is beautiful: no matter (as Abraham Licht says with an upward twist of his lip) that human beings have begun to foul it.

  (Does Elisha sometimes doubt that people, white or black, are devils?—and only the Lichts can be trusted?—Father then reads him tales from the newspapers, the confessions of the hard-hearted murderer Frank Abbott-Almy of Vermont, the “true story” of the monstrous Braxtons of Indiana, and, most ghastly of all, the saga of Widow Sorenson of Ohio, who acquired twenty-eight husbands by way of matrimonial journals, and, over a period of two decades, killed them for their money, and fed their remains to the hogs.

  The lesson being, as Elisha learns to shape with his lips, while Father speaks: All men are enemies, then or now; but, Brothers by blood are brothers by the soul.)

  THEN ONE DAY Abraham Licht declares that he is Licht again, and Elisha is Elisha; and very suddenly he is homesick for Muirkirk; and his beloved Sophie; and dear little Millicent, whose seventh birthday—is it the seventh?—he has missed, laboring here in the vineyards, casting his pearls before swine.

  So, within an hour or two, he sells the two-seater gig, and the sway-back horses, and buys some new clothes for himself and his boy, and arranges for them to travel to Chautauqua in a private Pullman car, now he is Licht again, now he can breathe again, now he can hold his head high again, $4,500 in clear profits, $6,200, perhaps it is as much as $9,000, and not one of the enemies reports the affair to the police, not Shattuck, nor Gunness, nor Budsberg, nor Schutt, nor Rulloff, nor the Abbotts, nor the Wilmots, nor the others, the many others, the contemptible execrable fools, not a one! not a one!

  “And do you know why, ’Lisha?” Abraham asks.

  ’Lisha grins and nods; ’Lisha knows; in mock solemnity wheeling, and turning about, and mouthing the words, the terrible words, I jump Jim Crow!

  2.

  When, in the spring of ’89, Abraham Licht brought the squalling black baby home with him, the red-haired woman with whom he was living—not Arabella, who had run off the previous year, and not Morna the minister’s daughter, whom he wasn’t to meet for several months—this woman, this ignorant woman, what did she do but push at Abraham and the baby both, laughing, incensed: “What is it! Keep it from me! I can’t be that thing’s mother.”

  He turned the woman out that very day.

  Forgot her name within a week.

  And soon Elisha, sickly little Elisha, was as dear to him as his own boys, or very nearly: for the pitiful creature had no mother, or fath
er, or name, or place of birth: as damned by the black God, it seemed, as by the white.

  In neither of whom, Abraham Licht boasted, he believed.

  Was it true that Elisha had been hooked and snagged out of a flooded river, pulled to shore, saved from drowning? . . . was it true that Abraham Licht, returning to his hotel room in the Nautauga Falls Arms, saved the baby himself?

  Indeed yes.

  Very certainly—yes.

  Though it had not been the Nautauga River but a rain-swollen ditch that ran beside a wooden sidewalk, just down the hill from the hotel, a filth-choked ditch three or four feet deep, the dark water swirling and gurgling and rushing along, as noisy, or nearly, as the great Nautauga itself.

  So the little black thing was snatched up, and saved.

  So the little black thing, howling, mouth opened to an enormous O, was snatched up, and saved, and hugged to the breast of the fashionably dressed white gentleman (chesterfield coat with black velvet collar, silk top hat, ivory-headed cane) whose cheeks were flushed and spirits gratified by a long evening of poker, at worthwhile stakes, at a private Nautauga Falls men’s club.

  “Why, the devil—!” Abraham Licht exclaimed, as the wailing creature soiled his coat sleeve, and thrashed about with a remarkable energy, “—it is the Devil! And am I to be its father?”

  AT THIS PROBLEMATIC time in Abraham Licht’s life Thurston was five years old, Harwood two, motherless boys for whom Abraham must find a mother, a decent mother, and soon: and he yearned, too, for a daughter: for would not a daughter complete his soul, indeed?—and help to make amends for the cruel treatment he had received at the hands of Arabella. He was obliged, too, to resume his business, or businesses, being not overly flushed with cash; most eager to launch the secret Society for the Reclamation & Restoration of E. Auguste Napoléon, the “true heir” of the Emperor. (To this end, Abraham had prepared for the printer certain genealogical charts, certificates, and model shares pertaining to the Society; and had scattered the vague hint, to credulous newspaper editors in the East, that the French government was conspiring to cheat a number of American citizens—some two hundred, or five hundred, or more—of their rightful inheritance as descendants of the bastard heir.)